Project by Anna Carl, Jimena Niquen
Few urban projects carry as much global and political attention as the Olympic Games, with bids often promising once-in-a-generation opportunities for transit, parks and housing redevelopment. London 2012 framed its bid explicitly as a regeneration strategy for East London while Tokyo 2020 adopted a more dispersed structure across multiple zones with most construction on reclaimed waterfront districts like Ariake and Odaiba. Although literature is increasingly critical of redevelopment promises—especially given systematic Olympic cost overruns and uncertain long-term benefits—place-based accounts suggest the Olympics can reshape local geographies of infrastructure, housing, and urban investment. This research builds on this tension by shifting the question from whether the Games “paid off” financially through infrastructure developments near Olympic sites. Using equal-area hexagonal grids, OpenStreetMap infrastructure layers, NDBI/NDWI satellite indices, and Getis-Ord Gi* hot spot analysis, we evauate whether London or Tokyo’s redevelopment strategies produced different spatial investment signatures.
